Thread: Entheogen: Awakening The Divine Within

Part of me agrees with you.

Another part of me sees the primary effect of psychedelic drugs as 'reality building'. By this I mean that feeling of significance; the connections that appear to the user. This can lead one to believe that since they have witnessed these connections, that the connections have some sort of objective and independent reality that is separate from the perceptual perspective of 'tripping'. On the one hand, these connections are no more or less real than the ones that exist from a sober perspective; on the other, though, there is the tendency for some to walk away from these experiences with more layers of illusion rather than less. This adding of extra layers are often interpreted to be just as transcendental as the feeling of shedding layers.

For instance, McKenna's description of 'gnomes' is a perfect example. Although these jeweled self dribbling basketballs that are creating the world for us through their visible language are a very pretty picture, they are nothing more than a very eloquently described illusion. The fact that this illusion is no better or worse than the one of atoms, bosons and fermions does not change the fact that the nature of illusion is to obscure and not to clarify.